Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia was born on the 18th of June 1901, and her father needed a long walk before he could bring himself to visit her. Tsar Nicholas II had hoped for a son, someone who would become heir to the throne. Instead his wife, Tsarina Alexandra, had given birth to a fourth daughter. The disappointment of the wider family was recorded in plain words. The Tsar's sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, exclaimed, "My God! What a disappointment!... a fourth girl!" A cousin, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, wrote, "Forgive us, Lord, if we all felt disappointment instead of joy. We were so hoping for a boy, and it's a daughter." The travel writer Burton Holmes put it more sharply: "Nicholas would part with half his Empire in exchange for one Imperial boy." The baby the family had not hoped for would become one of the most talked-about names of the twentieth century, borrowed by impostors and argued over for decades. Who was this girl before the legend? What did the people around her actually see? And how could a mystery about her last night stay open for so long?

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• 2. The Little Pair

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  Hard camp cots without pillows were where the Tsar's daughters slept, and every morning began with a cold bath. The imperial children were raised as simply as possible. Pillows were allowed only when a child was ill. The girls tidied their own rooms, and in spare moments they did needlework that was sold at charity events.

  Inside the household, almost nobody used her grand title. Servants and relatives usually called her by her first name and patronymic, Anastasia Nikolaevna. The nicknames came in several languages. There was the French Anastasie, and the Russian Nastasya, Nastya, Nastas and Nastenka. Malenkaya meant "little one". Shvybzik, from German, meant "merry little one" or "little mischief".

  The four sisters were sorted into pairs. Anastasia and her sister Maria shared a room, often wore variations of the same dress, and were known as The Little Pair. Olga and Tatiana shared another room and were The Big Pair. When the four wrote letters together, they sometimes signed with OTMA, built from the first letter of each name.

  The name itself carried a meaning. Anastasia is Greek and means "of the resurrection", and she was named for a fourth-century martyr, St. Anastasia. Storytellers later leaned on that meaning when they wrote about her rumored survival. Her title is most precisely translated as Grand Princess, though Grand Duchess became the usual English form.

  The tutor Sydney Gibbes remembered a gifted child who had no patience for the restrictions of the school room. The tutor Pierre Gilliard and the ladies-in-waiting Lili Dehn and Anna Vyrubova agreed on the rest. They described her as lively, mischievous and a gifted actress. Her sharp, witty remarks sometimes landed on sensitive spots, yet even as a baby she had entertained grave old men seated beside her at table with her astonishing remarks.

  Gleb Botkin, the son of the court physician Yevgeny Botkin, said she "undoubtedly held the record for punishable deeds in her family, for in naughtiness she was a true genius". She tripped servants and played pranks on her tutors. As a child she climbed trees and refused to come down. At the family's Polish estate, during a snowball fight, she rolled a rock into a snowball and threw it at Tatiana, who was knocked to the ground. At Livadia in the Crimea, her father had to pull her out of the water to save her from drowning.

  Not everyone found her charming. A distant cousin, Princess Nina Georgievna, recalled that Anastasia was "nasty to the point of being evil". She cheated, kicked and scratched her playmates, and she was affronted that the younger Nina was taller than she was. The American author Hallie Erminie Rives watched Anastasia, aged ten, eat chocolates at the St. Petersburg opera house without bothering to take off her long white opera gloves.

  That energetic girl had a body that did not always keep up with her.

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• 3. Body and Blood

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  Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, a lady-in-waiting to Anastasia's mother, left the clearest physical portrait. Anastasia was short and inclined to be chubby, with blue eyes and blonde hair. The baroness remembered regular, finely cut features, and "impish laughter" in the depths of her eyes, under dark eyebrows that nearly met. She thought Anastasia resembled her mother's family more than her father's. At seventeen she was still rather short and decidedly fat, but Buxhoeveden called it "the fatness of youth" and believed she would have outgrown it, as her sister Maria had.

  Behind the high spirits were ordinary physical troubles. Painful bunions affected both of her big toes. A weak muscle in her back led doctors to prescribe a massage twice a week, and she hid under the bed or in a cupboard to avoid it.

  A more serious worry ran through the family. In December 1914, Maria reportedly hemorrhaged during an operation to remove her tonsils. The surgeon was so unnerved that Alexandra had to order him to carry on. Years later, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, an aunt of the girls, said she believed that all four of her nieces bled more than was normal. She suspected they carried the hemophilia gene, as their mother did.

  Science eventually backed the suspicion. DNA testing on the remains of the imperial family proved in 2009 that Anastasia's younger brother, Alexei, had Hemophilia B, a rare form of the disease. His mother and one sister, identified as either Maria or Anastasia, were carriers. A carrier can show symptoms such as a lower-than-normal level of the blood-clotting factor, which can lead to heavy bleeding. Had Anastasia lived to have children, it is genetically probable that they would have been affected.

  The illness of the heir was also the reason a wandering holy man had a place in the family's nursery.

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• 4. Our Friend

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  In the autumn of 1907, the Tsar himself escorted his sister Olga Alexandrovna to the nursery to meet Grigori Rasputin. Anastasia, her sisters and her brother Alexei were all in long white nightgowns. "All the children seemed to like him," Olga Alexandrovna recalled. "They were completely at ease with him."

  Rasputin was a Russian peasant and wandering starets, or "holy man". Alexandra relied on his counsel, and she credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich on numerous occasions. The children were taught to call him "Our Friend" and to share their confidences with him. In February 1909 he sent them a telegram urging them to love the whole of God's nature, especially this earth, and noting that the Mother of God was always occupied with flowers and needlework.

  Not everyone in the household was comfortable. In 1910, the governess Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva was horrified that Rasputin could come to the nursery while the four girls were in their nightgowns, and she wanted him barred. Nicholas asked Rasputin to stay away from the nurseries in future. The children sensed the tension. On the 8th of March 1910, the twelve-year-old Tatiana wrote to her mother that she feared the governess might say something bad about their friend.

  Tyutcheva was eventually dismissed, and she took her story to other members of the family. By every account, Rasputin's visits to the children were completely innocent. Even so, the family was scandalized, and Xenia wrote that she could not understand how Alexandra and the children saw a saint in him.

  Rumor did the rest. Society whispered that Rasputin had seduced not only the Tsarina but also the four grand duchesses, and cartoons of that kind circulated. Nicholas ordered Rasputin out of St. Petersburg for a time, much to Alexandra's displeasure, and he went on a pilgrimage to Palestine. Despite everything, the association lasted until his murder on the 17th of December 1916. Only days before, on the 6th of December, Alexandra had written to Nicholas that Our Friend was contented with their girls and said their souls had developed much.

  The officer A. A. Mordvinov wrote in his memoirs that on the night the news arrived, the four grand duchesses looked cold and terribly upset. They sat huddled together on a sofa in one of their bedrooms, seeming to sense the upheaval ahead. Rasputin was buried with an icon signed on its reverse by Anastasia, her mother and her sisters. She attended his funeral on the 21st of December 1916, and the family planned to build a church over his grave. After the family was killed, it was discovered that Anastasia and her sisters were all wearing amulets bearing Rasputin's picture and a prayer.

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• 5. Captivity

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  Checkers and billiards were Anastasia's contribution to the war effort. At a private hospital in the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo, she and Maria visited wounded soldiers during World War I. The two teenagers were too young to train as Red Cross nurses like their mother and older sisters, so they tried to lift the men's spirits with games. One patient, Felix Dassel, remembered her "laugh like a squirrel" and a quick walk, as though she tripped along.

  In February 1917, during the Russian Revolution, the family was placed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. As the Bolsheviks approached, Alexander Kerensky of the Provisional Government had them moved to Tobolsk, in Siberia, where they were housed in the Governor's Mansion. After the Bolsheviks seized majority control of Russia, the family was moved again, to the Ipatiev House at Yekaterinburg, also called the House of Special Purpose.

  The uncertainty wore her down. In the winter of 1917 she wrote farewell words to a friend and asked not to be forgotten. At Tobolsk she wrote a melancholy theme for her English tutor, full of spelling mistakes, about "Evelyn Hope", a poem by Robert Browning. It concerns a girl who died at sixteen and a man who loved her without ever telling her so.

  Pierre Gilliard watched the family arrive in Yekaterinburg from a railway carriage. He saw the sailor Nagorny carrying Alexei, with the grand duchesses behind him loaded with bags. "Tatiana Nikolayevna came last carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise," he wrote. It was raining, and her feet sank into the mud with each step. A sentry pushed Gilliard back into the carriage. Baroness Buxhoeveden had her own last glimpse: a pink-sleeved arm opening the top pane of a window, belonging either to Maria or Anastasia.

  Yet joy had not left her. In the spring of 1918, she and others in the household performed plays for her parents, and Sydney Gibbes said her performance made everyone howl with laughter. On the 7th of May 1918, she wrote to Maria from Tobolsk about a fall from a swing that had made her roar with laughter. She said she could tell the story "masses of times", though her sisters had grown tired of hearing it.

  The guards at the Ipatiev House split in their opinions. Alexander Strekotin remembered her as very friendly and full of fun. Another guard called her "a very charming devil" who loved performing comic mimes with the dogs as if they were circus animals. A third called her "offensive and a terrorist", complaining that her provocative comments caused tension in the ranks. She and her sisters helped their maid darn stockings and helped the cook make bread.

  On the 14th of July 1918, local priests held a private service for the family. They noticed that the family, contrary to custom, knelt during the prayer for the dead, and that the girls no longer sang the responses. One priest whispered to the other, "Something has happened to them in there." The next day, though, Anastasia and her sisters seemed cheerful. They scrubbed floors alongside the cleaning women, whispered to them when the guards looked away, and Anastasia stuck her tongue out at the detachment's commander, Yakov Yurovsky, as soon as he turned his back.

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• 6. The Night in the Basement

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  When the White Army finally reached Yekaterinburg, the imperial family had simply disappeared. The Reds had known the city would fall to the better manned and better equipped Whites. Negotiations with the Romanovs' relatives, many of them prominent members of Europe's royal houses, had stalled. The most widely accepted account was that the family had been murdered. That conclusion came from the White investigator Nicholas Sokolov, who found items belonging to the family thrown down a mine shaft at Ganina Yama.

  A fuller account surfaced much later. Yurovsky had filed a report to his Bolshevik superiors, known as the Yurovsky Note. It was found in 1989 and detailed in Edvard Radzinsky's 1992 book, The Last Tsar. According to the note, the family was awakened that night and told to dress. They were told they were being moved for their own safety, in case violence broke out when the Whites arrived. They and the few servants who had stayed with them were taken to a small room in the sub-basement and told to wait. At the Empress's request, guards brought chairs for Alexandra and Alexei.

  After several minutes, the guards entered, led by Yurovsky, and told the family they were to be executed. The Tsar had time only to say "What?" and turn toward his family. He was killed by several bullets to the chest. The commonly repeated claim of a shot to the head is wrong, because the skull recovered in 1991 bears no bullet wounds. Alexandra and Olga tried to make the sign of the cross but died in the first volley. Most of the retinue was shot quickly. The exception was Anna Demidova, Alexandra's maid, who survived the first volley and was stabbed against the back wall. She had been defending herself with a small pillow packed with precious gems.

  The jewels were also what stopped some of the bullets. When thick smoke from the gunfire cleared, the executioners found that shots had ricocheted off the corsets of two or three of the grand duchesses. The family's diamonds and crown jewels had been sewn into the linings to hide them from their captors, and the corsets acted as a kind of armor.

  According to Yurovsky, Anastasia and Maria crouched against a wall with their hands over their heads until they were shot down. Another guard, Peter Ermakov, told his wife that Anastasia had been finished off with bayonets. As the bodies were carried out, Yurovsky wrote, one or more of the girls cried out and were clubbed on the back of the head.

  The gap between those two accounts, and the hours when the bodies lay in a truck, a basement and a corridor, left room for stories.

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• 7. Women Who Claimed Her Name

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  At least ten women claimed to be Anastasia, each with a different account of how she had lived. The best known was Anna Anderson, who first surfaced publicly between 1920 and 1922. Anderson said she had pretended to be dead among the bodies of her family and servants. A compassionate guard, she said, noticed she was still breathing and helped her escape.

  Her fight for recognition ran from 1938 to 1970 and became the longest running case ever heard by the German courts, where it was officially filed. The court's final decision was that Anderson had not provided enough proof to claim the identity of the grand duchess.

  She died in 1984 and was cremated. In 1994, scientists tested a tissue sample of hers held in a hospital against the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a great-nephew of Empress Alexandra. Dr Gill, who conducted the tests, said that if you accept the samples came from Anna Anderson, then she could not be related to Tsar Nicholas or Tsarina Alexandra. Her mitochondrial DNA matched a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska, a missing Polish factory worker. Some of Anderson's own supporters acknowledged that the tests had won the day.

  Other claimants followed. Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilyeva and Eugenia Smith were less well known. In the Ural Mountains, a priest took in two young women in 1919 who said they were Anastasia and Maria. They lived as nuns until their deaths in 1964 and were buried under those names.

  The rumors had roots in the confusion of 1918. Reports spread of Bolshevik soldiers and secret police searching trains and houses for "Anastasia Romanov". At Perm, Princess Helena Petrovna, wife of a distant cousin, Prince John Constantinovich, said a guard brought a girl calling herself Anastasia Romanova to her cell. Helena Petrovna did not recognize her. Other witnesses later claimed they saw the grand duchesses in Perm after the murders, but this story is now widely discredited.

  Some of the misinformation was deliberate. A few days after the murders, the German government sent telegrams demanding "the safety of the princesses of German blood". Russia had recently signed a peace treaty with Germany and did not want to upset it, so it said the women had been moved somewhere safer.

  One episode looked more convincing. In September 1918, eight witnesses reported the recapture of a young woman after an apparent escape at a railway station at Siding 37, northwest of Perm. Some identified her as Anastasia from photographs shown by White investigators. The physician Dr Pavel Utkin said the injured girl told him, "I am the daughter of the ruler, Anastasia." He had obtained a prescription for a patient named "N" at the secret police's orders, and White investigators later independently found the record.

  Fraud was also at work in 1918. Boris Soloviev, husband of Rasputin's daughter Maria, took money from prominent Russian families by saying a Romanov impostor needed to reach China. He also found young women willing to pose as grand duchesses.

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• 8. Bones and Proof

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  In 1991, a grave in the woods outside Yekaterinburg was excavated. It had been found nearly ten years earlier, but its discoverers kept it hidden from the Communists who still ruled the country. It held only nine of the expected eleven sets of remains. DNA and skeletal analysis matched them to Nicholas II, Alexandra, and three of the four grand duchesses, Olga, Tatiana and presumably Maria. The rest belonged to the doctor Yevgeny Botkin, the valet Alexei Trupp, the cook Ivan Kharitonov and the maid Anna Demidova.

  Then came a dispute over who was missing. The American forensic expert William R. Maples found that Alexei and Anastasia were absent. Russian scientists said the missing daughter was Maria. They identified the body as Anastasia's by running a computer program to compare photographs with the skulls, estimating the height and width where bone was missing. American scientists found this method inexact. They pointed out that none of the female skeletons showed signs of immaturity, such as an immature collarbone or undescended wisdom teeth, that a seventeen-year-old would have.

  Height added to the doubt. When the remains were interred in 1998, a body measuring about 5 ft 7 in was buried under Anastasia's name. Photographs taken up to six months before the murders show her several inches shorter than all her sisters. On the 15th of December 1917, her mother wrote that Anastasia, "to her despair, is now very fat" and hoped she would grow. Scientists thought it unlikely she could have grown so much afterward. Her actual height was about 5 ft 2 in.

  The Yurovsky Note said two bodies had been removed from the main grave and cremated elsewhere, so that the body count would be wrong if the Whites found it. On the 23rd of August 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg. The site matched Yurovsky's description. They were found with shards of a sulfuric acid container, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various calibers, and the archaeologists located the site using metal detectors and metal rods as probes. The bones came from a boy of about twelve to fifteen and a young woman of about fifteen to nineteen.

  The ages fit the family. Anastasia was seventeen years and one month old when she died, while Maria was nineteen and Alexei was two weeks short of fourteen. Olga was twenty-two and Tatiana twenty-one. DNA testing by several international laboratories, including the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and Innsbruck Medical University, confirmed that the remains belonged to Alexei and one of his sisters. All the family members had died in 1918, and each parent and child now had a distinct DNA profile.

  One question was still not settled. One of the studies conceded that the debate over which daughter, Maria or Anastasia, came from the second grave could not be settled by the DNA results alone. Without a reference sample from each sister, they could conclusively identify only Alexei.

  The Church has honored the family in stages. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad canonized them as holy martyrs in 1981, and the Russian Orthodox Church canonized them as passion bearers in 2000. Nicholas, Alexandra and three daughters were interred in the St. Catherine Chapel at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg on the 17th of July 1998, eighty years after the murders. As of 2018, the bones of Alexei and Maria, or possibly Anastasia, were still held by the Orthodox Church.

  The legend has proved harder to bury. The earliest film on her supposed survival, made in 1928, was Clothes Make the Woman, about a woman hired to play a rescued Anastasia for a Hollywood film. It was followed by the 1956 film starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, the 1997 animated film it inspired, and a Broadway musical based on that cartoon.

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